The Double Tap

Marie sat up and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I’ll drive the next bit if you like.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Lynch. He’d actually enjoyed the drive, it had given him time to think.

‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Provisions for me,’ he replied. ‘And a train ticket back to London for you.’

Marie’s jaw dropped. ‘What?’

‘Don’t look so surprised, love,’ said Lynch. ‘The deal was that you help me get out of London. I shouldn’t even have brought you this far.’

‘Dermott, I want to help. I want to stay with you.’

Lynch opened the door. ‘We’ve been through this, Marie. It’s for the best.’ They walked together out of the car park and along Redcliffe Way, one of the main shopping streets. Marie slipped her arm through Lynch’s as if they were a courting couple. ‘And don’t think you can make me change my mind,’ said Lynch.

Marie raised her eyebrows. ‘This is just cover,’ she laughed. ‘There’s no ulterior motive.’ She squeezed his arm tightly. Lynch nodded at a sign that indicated they were walking towards Temple Meads Station but Marie pretended not to notice. ‘Are you hungry?’ she asked.

‘I could eat,’ replied Lynch, half-heartedly.

‘So let’s,’ she said, pulling him towards a cafe.

‘There’s something I want to buy first,’ said Lynch. He found a camping store in Redcliffe Way, its window filled with tents, portable stoves and climbing ropes. Inside was a rack of maps and Lynch went through them. Several were Ordnance Survey maps but others were commercial versions which utilised their own reference systems. He found several of Wales but only one which used lines of longitude and latitude. It was a large scale map of the country and he had considerable trouble unfolding it. He had memorised the reference numbers that the Irish air traffic controller had given him and he ran his finger across to where the two lines met. ‘Swansea?’ asked Marie, looking at where he was pointing.

‘Somewhere close by,’ he said. ‘I need a larger scale.’

Marie nodded. ‘West Glamorgan, isn’t it?’ She went through the rack as Lynch refolded the map, laughing at his unwieldy attempts to put it back into its original form. Minutes later, Marie handed him a large scale map of West Glamorgan and took the map of Wales from him. She folded it with a few deft movements and slid it back into the rack.

Lynch opened the map of West Glamorgan and checked whether it too had lines of longitude and latitude. It did. ‘Perfect,’ he said. He went over to a display case. An elderly man in brown overalls came across and Lynch asked to see a pair of high powered binoculars. He bought them, the map, and a compass and then left the shop with Marie.

They went back to the cafe and after ordering himself a cheeseburger and coffee, and Marie a salad and Diet Coke, Lynch spread the map out over the table. Marie switched seats so that she was sitting next to him. ‘There’s Swansea,’ she said. ‘And there’s the airport to the west.’

Lynch shook his head as he ran his finger down the map. ‘They didn’t land at the airport,’ he said. He tapped the map. ‘Here. This is where they went down.’

Marie peered at the name Lynch was indicating, a small village close to the tip of a peninsula which stuck out fifteen miles into the Bristol Channel, separating Carmarthen Bay and Swansea Bay. ‘Llanrhidian,’ she read.

‘About half a mile to the north-east of it.’

Marie sat back and brushed the hair from her eyes. ‘What makes you think he’s still there?’

Lynch refolded the map. This time he managed to do it first time and he smiled to himself. ‘I don’t, but it’s the only clue I’ve got,’ he said. ‘If he was going on somewhere else, I think they’d have taken him straight to the airport.’ He stood up. ‘I’m going to the toilet,’ he said.

In the bathroom, Lynch splashed cold water onto his face and stood for a while appraising his reflection in the mirror above the sink. The new hairstyle suited him, and the colour looked natural enough. He dried his face on the roller towel then went back into the cafe.

Marie’s head was bent over a newspaper. Lynch frowned. She hadn’t had time to go and buy a paper. Then he saw copies of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Telegraph by the cash register and realised that the cafe owners supplied them free for customers. Marie turned the front page and ran a hand through her hair as she read. Lynch had a pretty good idea what had grabbed her attention. He slid into the seat opposite her. She looked up sharply. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she snapped. Lynch was taken aback. Anger wasn’t the reaction he’d expected — he’d assumed she’d feel scared. He smiled, trying to put her at ease. ‘Don’t fucking grin at me like a chimpanzee with a hard on,’ she hissed angrily.

‘What?’ he said, stunned.

‘Don’t give me what, you know exactly what I’m talking about.’ She closed the paper and tossed it at him. It was that morning’s Daily Mail. The story splashed across the front page had been written by the paper’s chief reporter and he clearly had better sources than the radio reporter Lynch had listened to in the car. The Mail story identified the four shooting victims as an IRA team and named the man who had survived as Declan McGee of Belfast. Lynch didn’t recognise the name, but that meant nothing. According to the Mail, the police were treating the incident as an internal IRA dispute. Yeah, thought Lynch, they were dead right there. The UFF and the UVF had issued separate statements saying that they weren’t involved in the killings and that they remained committed to the peace process.

‘So?’ said Marie, jarring his concentration. Lynch held his hand up to her lips as he continued to read, but she pushed it away. She sat back in her seat and folded her arms defensively across her chest.

The reporter quoted an unnamed Security Service source as saying that the Maida Vale shootings were thought to be connected to the death of Pat O’Riordan in the Republic, which was now being treated as murder and not suicide. Lynch’s eyes widened. Pat O’Riordan, dead? The news hit him like a punch to the solar plexus. Any doubts that the IRA had signed his death warrant evaporated. He was a marked man.

The reporter suggested that the killings were the result of a struggle for power in the top echelons of the IRA, with the hardliners being unhappy at the lack of progress on the political front. Lynch wondered who had fed the reporter that particular line. It could have been someone within the organisation, trying to steer the flak away from McCormack, or a Protestant source trying to discredit the IRA. Either way, Lynch knew that the deaths were nothing to do with any power struggle: the IRA was trying to distance itself from the deaths of the Americans, and O’Riordan and Lynch had been tagged as the fall guys. The story continued inside the paper but it was mostly background material on previous IRA activities on the mainland, along with a piece written by an Oxford don speculating on the effect the killings might have on the Irish political situation and the peace process. The piece came to no conclusion, which was hardly a surprise to Lynch. Most of what was written in the media about the organisation was speculation; uninformed at best, misinformation spread by the Security Services at worst. He closed the paper and rested his arms on it. Marie was waiting for him to speak. ‘I should have told you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s not good enough, Dermott.’

A waitress carried over a tray and put Lynch’s cheeseburger down in front of him. Lynch nodded his thanks and poured milk into his coffee as the waitress passed Marie her salad. He waited until the waitress was out of hearing range before speaking. ‘I wasn’t sure that I could trust you,’ he said.

‘Well I’m damn sure I can’t trust you,’ she replied. She picked up a fork and prodded a slice of tomato. ‘How can they call this a salad? A tomato, three lettuce leaves that any self-respecting rabbit wouldn’t look at twice and half a dozen slices of week-old cucumber.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Lynch.

‘Who do you think I am? Some tout who’d go running to the police at the first sign of trouble?’

Lynch shrugged. He looked down at his cheeseburger but he’d lost his appetite. Pat O’Riordan, dead. He remembered how the big man had clasped him to his chest on the day they’d said goodbye. ‘Take care of yourself,’ O’Riordan had said. Lynch intended to do just that. He took a mouthful of coffee and swallowed it as he considered what to say to her. ‘I was going to tell you,’ he said.

‘When?’

‘Eventually.’

‘That’s no answer.’ She put down her fork and leaned across the table. ‘I’m in this with you and I’ll do whatever it takes to help. I don’t expect you to compromise the organisation or to name names, but I don’t expect